A resident of St. Petersburg who received a paper summons to appear for a military medical examination on April 29, 2026 was prevented from leaving first at the Russia-Belarus land border and later at Minsk airport. The case was reported by the Movement of Conscientious Objectors.
According to the group, the man was served the summons in early April, and the electronic registry then showed a restriction on leaving Russia. He was first removed from ground transport at the Belarus border and orally told that he was banned from departure. He later reached Belarus by train via Smolensk, where there were no checks, but in Minsk he was denied boarding on a flight to Tbilisi. Two days later, he tried again, this time flying to Yerevan with his internal Russian passport, and was refused once more.
“The Belarus case is the first one in which a person was removed from transport at the land border and then blocked from leaving Belarus on the basis of information from the Russian electronic registry,” Artem Klyga, head of the legal department of the Movement of Conscientious Objectors, told Novaya-Europe.
School of the Conscript lawyer Timofey Vaskin confirmed to the outlet that this was the first such case publicly known to rights defenders. At the same time, opinions differ on the reason. The Movement of Conscientious Objectors says Belarusian authorities may have gained access to information from the Russian registry. Grigory Sverdlin, head of the Get Lost rights project, called that explanation doubtful and noted that on April 22 there was a successful departure through Belarus despite an electronic summons.
Vaskin said it is more likely that Moscow and Minsk are gradually synchronizing their border databases. According to Get Lost, since October 14, 2025 the project has received 15 requests for help from conscripts facing summons-related travel restrictions: in 13 cases they still managed to leave, and in two they were blocked.